One Gold Ring
by TorontoBatFan
Summary: It's Christmas Eve of 1984.  Owen finds a moment to give Abby a special Christmas present.


_Greetings, dear readers and season's greetings to everyone._

_I'm so glad I was able to get this Christmas story written and published in time. This is just a little Christmas story I had in mind when I was writing Chapter VII of "Eternally Bonded". In case anyone was wondering about what Owen was bending down for when they came up from their swim in the river, you'll now find out._

_There are certain elements/characters present in this story that might come as a complete surprise to my regular readers. Well, that's because of events I have planned for other fics that will take place between "Eternally Bonded" -which was set in May of 1984- and this one which takes place on Christmas Eve of 1984. So, I guess you could say that there are some spoilers inherent in the text. :-D_

_If anyone wants to get me anything for Christmas...reviews are always appreciated, never exchanged and NEVER re-gifted. LOL_

_Thanks for reading my fics, and I hope everyone has a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! :-D_

One Gold Ring

**Cold Creek, Montana; December 24****th****, 1984**

It was December of 1984. In Washington D.C., President Ronald Reagan prepared for his second inauguration that would take place the following January. Likewise in Washington, Vice-President George H.W. Bush looks ahead to 1988. In Little Rock, Arkansas, re-elected Governor Bill Clinton prepares for his own inauguration…and thinks of higher dreams. In the small town of Tarker's Mills, Maine, a wheelchair bound boy named Marty Coslaw prepares a trap for the beast that had plagued his town over the cycle of the year now ending. All across North America, and much of the world, people prepared for Christmas.

In the town of Cold Creek, Montana, store fronts were decorated for Christmas. The recently rebuilt and re-opened (complete with a state of the art sprinkler system) Foreman Funeral Parlour was sponsoring an ice-sculpting contest in the town square.

Ten miles outside of Cold Creek, on the Alfredson sheep ranch, snow began to fall from a leaden sky, beginning to coat the recently shoveled walkway, steps and –in the yard- a fairly recently erected jungle gym. From inside the festively decorated ranch house, came the sound of a nine month old infant crying, in anticipation of a late-afternoon feeding, as the sun slipped below the horizon.

The light fled from the winter sky and night arrived again. The time of the vampire had come.

Down in a cellar turned bedroom, two sets of eyes opened. One set stayed open. The other set tried to close themselves again.

"Owen?"

"Hmm"

"It's time to get up."

"Five more minutes, Abby?" Was the reply that was muffled by the pillow that Owen had buried his face in.

"Nope" Abby giggled. Owen, she'd learned, woke up as a vampire the same way he seemed to have done as a human…namely, reluctantly. "Come on." She said as she turned on the reading lamp and bodily pulled Owen up to a sitting position.

"I'm up, I'm up." He mumbled as he ran his hand through his dark hair and pushed back the covers. The air felt cold on his nude body, but it didn't really bother him. As Abby had described herself once, he really didn't get cold any more.

He looked about the room. It had changed a little in the seven months that he'd been living down here. Now, the shelves held some of his books and possessions, alongside Abby's, transferred from his old room upstairs. A new set of hooks had been placed on the wall to hang his clothing from. And, some of Abby's posters had been displaced so Owen would put up some of his.

Abby then turned her back to him and poured some water from a thermos into a basin and set about brushing her teeth. While she was distracted, Owen silently checked the pocket of his pants. He smiled as he assured himself it was still there. He couldn't wait to see Abby's face when he gave it to her. Reassured that his planned surprise hadn't been spoiled, Owen stepped over to the wash basin, picked up his own toothbrush and accepted the Colgate Pump toothpaste from Abby. He pumped some Colgate gel onto his brush and set about his regular ritual. (He would have found it funny once, but he'd learned that vampires liked having clean teeth as much as anyone else.)

Ten minutes later, after having dressed and consumed a bottle of blood apiece, Owen and Abby, each carrying a coat over their arm, emerged from their quarters into a gentle evening's snowfall. Owen looked at Abby and smiled. He always thought she looked so pretty when it snowed. It tended to not melt on her cold skin and hair, giving her the appearance of some sort of snow fairy. He took her hand and they walked along the side of the house together.

"It looks like the jungle gym got a lot of use today." Abby said, pointing towards it. Owen looked and saw a great deal of footprints –now being filled by the falling snow- surrounded the jungle gym.

"I guess Grandpa and Uncle Lyle brought Johnny outside to play on it." Owen said.

"I hope they took some pictures." Abby said as she looked at the playground apparatus that had once stood in the courtyard of Owen's old apartment complex in Los Alamos.

"So do I." Owen said as he looked at the jungle gym where he and Abby had first met and fallen in love. He thought it looked rather good, sitting in their yard now. In all honestly, it looked even better than it had when they'd first met. He and Abby had spent the better part of every night for two weeks working on it. They'd sanded off all the rust, applied several coats of rust-proof paint, and then reassembled it.

The two vampires walked past the jungle gym and entered the house through the kitchen door. Oscar Alfredson looked up from the kitchen table, where he was reading the newspaper and smiled at his grandchildren from behind his horned rimmed reading glasses.

"Right on schedule, I see." He said with a smile as they acknowledged him.

"Where's Uncle Lyle?" Owen asked.

"He's taking a nap. He wore himself out a little with Johnny this afternoon. I think he's also still on San Francisco time." Oscar said with a chuckle.

"You had him on the jungle gym?" Abby asked as she walked to the fridge and removed the flowers they'd been keeping there. Owen walked into the living room and made for the playpen in the middle of the floor.

"Sure did." Owen heard his grandfather say as he stopped before the playpen and look down into it. Dozing inside was a dark-haired infant of nine months, clad in blue pajamas. Owen reached down silently and pulled up the blanket a half-inch. Having made sure that his baby brother was sleeping peacefully, Owen returned to the kitchen.

"It looks like Johnny tired himself out as much as Uncle Lyle." Owen said with a smile. He counted three sets of flowers. He placed his feet into a pair of boots as Abby pulled on her coat. Owen did the same with his own coat.

"How long do you think you'll be?" Oscar asked as he stepped over to the stove to check on dinner.

"Not more than a half-hour, I think." Abby said as she and Owen picked up the flowers and stepped out of the house again.

"My jacket looks good on you." Owen said with a smile.

"It does?"

"Totally" Owen said as he looked at the silver jacket Abby wore. It was the same one he'd been wearing when they fled Los Alamos. He'd outgrown it well over a year ago, but Abby had then taken to wearing it whenever they had to go anywhere they might be seen in cold weather and her lack of a jacket would be noticed. "My spacesuit definitely works on you."

"Your what?"

"I never told you? Well, it kind of looks like a spacesuit –the old silver ones, like the type John Glenn wore. Back in Los Alamos, when I would put it on, I used to pretend that it was a real spacesuit and that I was blasting off to some big adventure. Or, maybe that it would at least protect me, like a real spacesuit, from all the stuff I had happening to me then." Owen finished quietly. He shook his head as if to clear it. He now had absolutely nothing left in Los Alamos and planned to never again, in the eternity that now lay before him, step back in that town. Abby sensed his momentary dark mood and touched his arm gently.

"I always thought you looked handsome in it. It was like a suit of armour, because that's what you've always been to me: my knight in shining armour." She said as she gave Owen a kiss. Owen smiled and pulled his eternal mate close, touching his forehead to her own briefly.

"Let's go." He said, as the two vampires took to the night sky.

Scant minutes later, Owen and Abby had set themselves down in the Cold Creek Cemetary. Silently, they walked among the various headstones and monuments. Abby noted they passed the fairly recently erected marker for Sally Lawton. There were fresh flowers there, placed by Joe Lawton before he left for Chicago to visit his son and family for Christmas.

Abby silently murmured another apology to Sally Lawton –both for what her uncle did, followed by what she and Owen did. Owen had asked her at the time if they had to do it. Abby felt they did. Vampires turned in that way –those who had been declared dead and rose again- were bound far more by instinct and retained far less control. She would have preyed on her own family. Even if she hadn't succeeded in feeding off of them, Abby couldn't begin to imagine how they'd react to seeing her return in that way. Abby had summed it up to Owen by saying that the only other way would be for Sally to never see her loved ones ever again. Abby asked Owen what he would have wanted if he'd been turned but could never have seen her again. Owen agreed with her that eternity would be a curse rather than a blessing if one would always be apart from the one they loved. (Abby had already realized that after Owen came into her life. He turned her immortality from a curse into a blessing.)

Soon enough, they reached the spot where members of the Alfredson family had long been laid to rest. Owen sighed heavily and placed the two of the bouquets before a plaque with a pair of names that had only been in place since the summer. He kneeled in the snow and touched it. Abby left him to his private communion and went over to a far older headstone. She placed the flowers before it and looked at the name on the marker: Elina Alfredson. She brushed some snow away and, as she'd done so often since joining Owen's family, wished she could have met Owen's late grandmother.

Owen stood and stepped over to his grandmother's headstone. He looked down at his solemnly. In truth, he had a hard time remembering her, as he'd been so young the last time he'd seen her. He still felt her presence in the house though. His grandfather kept her pictures around and recounted the experiences they had.

After this Christmas visit –that the rest of the family planned to make before attending a church service later on- Owen and Abby took to the snowy air to return to the ranch. They swooped low over the woods by the house and landed in a clearing where they'd built a snowman a week, or so, prior when some packing snow had fallen. Abby had never built a snowman before, but quickly got into the spirit of it. Owen had even suggested they put a dark cape on it and give it fangs, in lieu of the traditional hat and carrot-nose. He and Abby had fallen over laughing as they visualized it.

Walking back to the house, Abby noticed a rental car was now parked in the drive, beside Oscar's pick-up truck.

"I guess Stefan arrived." She noted. Uncle Lyle's significant other had been unable to fly out with Lyle three days prior due to his job and had been planning to catch a flight from San Francisco to Missoula that afternoon.

"Yeah, Uncle Lyle was starting to get worried he wouldn't make it in time."

"I wonder how he'll react to us." Abby mused. She suddenly wished she'd put some shoes on before leaving for the cemetery. She thought that might at least make her seem less...otherworldly.

"Let's go with what we planned. Let him get used to us…Then, we kind of find a way to work it in."

"And do what Uncle Lyle suggested to us –let him have two or three Manhattans to let him mellow out first."

"Uncle Lyle took the news alright."

"Yeah, but he's related, by blood, to you and Grandpa. That means he's got the best of genes." Abby said with a smile. Owen smiled back at her. He stopped in front of the jungle gym.

"What?" Abby asked. Owen's reply was to simply lift her up and sit her gently on the jungle gym as she giggled.

"I wanted to give you something."

"What?"

"A little something for Christmas."

"I thought we were doing presents tomorrow evening."

"We are. But, this is something special I want to give to you in private."

"What is it?" Abby asked with a curious smile on her face.

"Well, we said, back in May, that you turning me meant we can consider ourselves to be married…."

"Yes?"

"Well…I thought that if that was the case, you should have this." Owen said shyly as he pulled a small gold ring from his pocket."

"Owen!" Abby gasped is shock and delight as he slipped it on her left ring finger. To his immense relief it fit perfectly.

"Where did you get it?" Abby said as she looked at it.

"Well, I hope it doesn't bother you…But it was off of Jebediah. I found it on my first night, back in May, on the driveway where the sun got him. Do you remember when we came back to the house after being in the river?"

"That was what you were bending down for?"

"Yeah, I saw it there and I thought it would great for you."

"But, wasn't it all melted?"

"Not totally. I've been working on reshaping it and smoothing it out off and on since then. It doesn't bother you that it was on him?"

Abby looked at the ring again. Now that she was looking for it, she could definitely see that it had a pattern to it that matched ones worn in her family. She smiled at Owen.

"Not at all; you turned it from something that came from him…to something that came from you." Abby said with a smile as she caressed Owen's cheek.

"Good" Owen said with a smile as he held out his hand and Abby hopped down from the jungle gym. He took her in his arms and kissed her long and hard on the lips.

"I love you Abby."

"I love you too." She smiled at him warmly. "Now let's go inside. It's time to get Christmas Eve underway and I want to see if anyone notices this." She said as she looked down at her new wedding ring. Owen smiled as he took her hand in his again, and led her back into the house to begin their Christmas celebrations.


End file.
